Local teens compete for $20,000 in national Poetry Out Loud competition (via WTOP)

Local high school students Daiana James and Kyle Fox Shreve are prepping for a major national competition that kicks off this week. But their training doesn’t involve carb loading, stretching and weight training; for them, it’s all about memorization and recitation.

James and Shreve compete with poetry, and this week, they’re headed to the national Poetry Out Loud competition at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, where they’ll attempt to beat out 51 other high school students from all 50 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico for a first-place prize of $20,000.

Both teens never predicted they’d eventually compete on stage with stanzas and sonnets. It just started with a routine English assignment: find a poem and recite it in front of the class.